Ronda Rousey helped shape the UFC into the billion-dollar machine it's become, elevate its relevance and audience, and show all of us the power and greatness that was waiting to be unearthed in the women's divisions.
So it's a shame we're likely to watch Rousey get knocked out at UFC 207 -- both in the fight, and from the sport itself.
On Friday, when Rousey returns after a year-long, self-imposed banishment from the sport she once ruled, get ready for Amanda Nunes to get the best of the former bantamweight champion. Nunes keeps the belt. Rousey keeps that shadow of defeat, the one that's been with her since her air-of-invincibility dissipated during Holly Holm's shocking upset last December at UFC 193.
It just feels ... inevitable.
For starters, the bantamweight division has become Rousey's personal Frankenstein. She created the deep and dangerous level of talent filling the UFC's women's 135-pound division through her greatness in the octagon -- and, outside of it, through her force of will in branding and spreading the message that the women were every bit as worthy as the men to step in and fight at this level.
Rousey helped build something beautiful ... and dangerous. I suppose it was inevitable that in a sport so treacherous, her creation would eventually rise up to beat her into submission.
So the belt went from Rousey to Holm, then from Holm to Miesha Tate, then from Tate to Nunes, each passage another step up in what awaited Rousey when she decided to return.
Watching Nunes destroy Tate at UFC 200 in Vegas felt like a turning point. As good as the division had been in 2016, Nunes was a fighter of another caliber. She's a beast, and more than ready to prove it to the former champion.
Rousey, meanwhile, is on life-tilt and heading into a fight against one of the sport's most dangerous strikers. Nunes has never been submitted in her pro career. And she will have absolutely no fear of Rousey, only a deeply-held belief she can mete out all the punishment necessary to get it done.
Rousey's greatest defense -- that sheen of fear and impenetrable greatness -- is gone. Nunes knows it, and she'll attack accordingly.
Rousey's greatness was always largely enhanced by the same thing that once made Tiger Woods so dangerous: An air of invincibility that seemed real to not just the opposition, but to the invincible as well.
But once that veneer vanishes, everything changes. It did for Tiger. It has for Rousey.
One loss, and the UFC's most daring and dominant personality this side of Conor McGregor couldn't face the world. She talked about having suicidal thoughts. She vanished. Rousey's painfully long hiatus from the sport was a sea change in how she interacted with, and shaped, how her sport and her would-be opponents perceived her. Even now, days before the fight, she's hiding -- pulling a media disappearing act that feels less like McGregor's I-can-do-whatever-the-hell-I-want braggadocio and more like a wounded fighter still filled with doubts about what happens once she's in that octagon.
And Nunes has certainly taken notice.
"I don't know what is wrong with this girl, I'm gonna be honest with you," Nunes told reporters this week. "But if she wants to play this game, she's playing with the wrong person. I'm very focused and I know how I'm gonna stop her..."
This week, Rashad Evans told me that nothing can rattle a fighter more than not knowing when you step into the octagon if you still have it.
My bet is that Rousey doesn't, and she knows it, and soon enough the world will, too.
